Politics + exploration for exploration's sake always seems at odds.
Robotic space exploration is awesome, but it doesn't capture the human imagination the way a human mission does. I also think -- and the academic types be damned -- that there is a difference between sending a robot and actually going somewhere.
In the long term I think Mars will be settled by humans. Sending humans to land there for a bit is a first step, a fact-finding mission.
If that is true, they have already lost. Doing "something big" for the primary purpose of "avoiding fading into the night" is doomed to failure. (Again, per the other comments.) Take all that money and give it to Elon Musk and we'd probably get further. And I mean, just give it. Free and clear. To spend on hookers and blow if he wants to. We'd still probably get more out of it as a species. He doesn't want to ensure the continued existence of a big bureaucracy... he wants to get to Mars.
I'm sure there are people within NASA that want to get to Mars... but are they the ones in charge?
NASA should be dreaming much bigger. How about manned missions to Jupiter? Maybe after failing at the impossible for a while we'll at least get a better concept of how far away the rest of pretty much anywhere in space is, and stop thinking about planetary exploration as a lifeboat for our species.
NASA should be dreaming much bigger.
There just isn't any good real estate off-Earth in this solar system. Relativity limits us to the solar system. Deal with it.
This is a broken analogy in two ways.
One is that there's a huge qualitative difference between going elsewhere on Earth and settling another planet, and I don't think you can hand-wave that away. You might have no interest in settling another planet, which is fine. There are seven billion plus people on Earth, and all we need is about 10,000 over, say, a century or two who do have that interest. I think you'd have so many applicants for a serious mission you'd have to be very picky.
Secondly, it's illegal to settle Antarctica. It's all "claimed" and tied up in various treaties and conservation laws. What would happen if you opened Antarctica to settlement and allowed squatters' rights or land claim rights? I think a whole bunch of people who are interested in trying new political ideas, etc., would jump at it. It'd be significantly easier and cheaper than seasteading. There'd also be natural resources to be found, so you'd probably have a gold rush.
The best option is not screwing up our planet. If asteroid strikes is the concern, then funding a planetwide network of residents living in underground bunkers with supplies to last decades is probably cheaper and more effective than going to Mars.
That isn't even close to the best option. That's like saying: "don't make backups, just don't screw up."
edit: to be more specific, "make makeups, but also try not to screw up"
That does not even belong in the same category. Data backups in computer systems are cheap, and people/organizations not doing them even cheaper!
On the other hand, doctors don't make backups of the gravely ill[1] before a dangerous surgery. That is beyond our current capabilities, so "do not screw up" is as good as it gets.
Yet another example, civil engineers do not make backups of skyscrapers[2] before doing maintenance work, even major maintenance work. While technically feasible, the economic cost would be prohibitive.
My gut feeling is that a "backup planet" would fall somewhere in between cases [1] and [2].
It's very hard to imagine what we could do to Earth so that it becomes even less hospitable than mars.
If "lifeboat for species" is the goal, then going to Mars is a solution in that direction but not a particularly good one - building an underground colony in Antarctica or a self-sustainable isolated underwater colony would achieve the goal better, be reachable quicker, and at a lower cost. However, 'lifeboat for species' right now is not an explicit end goal for anyone who would be capable to fund that.
We're not looking for a lifeboat, humanity is simply looking for another planet to screw up.
- Expanding into a new environment drives evolution.
- The technological innovations that will be needed to sustain a settlement on Mars will be hugely valuable back home.
- There is presently no frontier where new political or social ideas can be attempted without interference. Again -- the results of these "experiments" can be exported back home.
The last two are huge. The main exports from a Mars colony would probably be ideas and technology. Those also have the advantage of being able to be transmitted wirelessly and having no mass.
Evolution is usually very unpleasant for the individuals being naturally selected away. How is this a good thing?
BTW... if we don't transition off fossil fuels in the next 50-ish years we are going to experience some of Ye Olde Tyme Evolution here on Earth. Personally I think Mars would be a better place to be in that scenario. There was a sci-fi film called Alternative Three made about that.
We are looking at space exploration in the wrong way. All space organizations seem to have entered this sort of competition where manned missions to just about anywhere currently reachable in limited time is the goal. Nobody is pausing to think that maybe we should look into better travelling options to be able to explore far off planets and objects. The probability increases with reachable area.
It absolutely isn't. It is very, very unlikely that one can break the laws of physics no matter how much time it takes to research it or how advanced one becomes.
Still - it is important to research it in-case we've missed or gotten something wrong.
FTL travel is completely unnecessary for interstellar travel, thanks to relativity. If you're traveling 1000 light years at 0.99999999999999999c, you will get there very nearly instantly. Of course, you've basically taken a one way ticket - if you turn back around, 2000 years will have passed back home even though you're only a few seconds older.
Of course, 0.99999999999999999c is itself no mean feat (to say the least - the energy costs for even 0.5c would be incredible), but there's nothing about it that violates the laws of physics.
I am sorry about being dismissive, but I wish people would be more contemplative before sending our government headlong into the next boondogle. This is important stuff. We are talking about a lot of money here. Democracy is a duty is as well as a right. There are a lot of government agencies that would like to "capture your imagination", i.e., get you to write them a blank check, but we have to be a little more discerning.
Those costs are estimated at about 4 trillion. The apolo mission cost about 100 billion in today's dollars. A Mars mission will be much more difficult and building rockets has not gotten cheaper over these years. It might be more expensive, because quality engineers are much better paid now even after adjusting for inflation.
I would not be surprised if a manned mars mission costs a trillion or two.
Very reasonable.
Guess what, the Navy doesn't build nuclear submarines. They contract companies to build nuclear submarines. The Air Force doesn't build fighter jets. They contract companies to build fighter jets. NASA didn't build a lot of the Apollo tech, they contracted companies to build Apollo. NASA also contracted companies for Constellation, the Space Shuttle, Orion, SLS, etc.
It's how the government works.
There are some 100% government financed research labs. There is the question of how much oversight the government has over the contractor (service vs design/build). There are different kinds of contracts (fixed price vs cost+).
At no point in time was the government ever building things 100% on their own, it has always been a spectrum. We are moving towards the end of the spectrum where NASA moves one responsibility (launching unmanned payloads to LEO) to a fixed-cost low-oversight service contract. That's great. But it's not like NASA woke up yesterday and realized the private sector is good at doing this kind of stuff.